This article was downloaded by: [University of Aegean] On: 29 May 2013, At: 02:22 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Landscape Research Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/clar20 “Instead of 40 Sheep there are 400”: Traditional Grazing Practices and Landscape Change in Western Lesvos, Greece Thanasis Kizos a , Tobias Plieninger b c & Harald Schaich c a Department of Geography , University of the Aegean , Mytilini , Greece b Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management , University of Copenhagen , Denmark c Chair for Landscape Management, Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources , University of Freiburg , Germany Published online: 29 May 2013. 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Landscape Research, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2013.783905 “Instead of 40 Sheep there are 400”: Traditional Grazing Practices and Landscape Change in Western Lesvos, Greece THANASIS KIZOS*, TOBIAS PLIENINGER**† & HARALD SCHAICH† *Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, Mytilini, Greece **Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark †Chair for Landscape Management, Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Freiburg, Germany, ABSTRACT In the semi-arid zones of the Eastern Mediterranean, husbandry of sheep and goats has been an integral part of livelihoods and survival strategies since the Neolithic, but underwent major changes after approximately the 1960s. In this paper, we analyse the landscape changes that were induced by the following increase of sheep numbers and the underlying socio-economic and biophysical driving forces in an insular semi-arid locality of the Eastern Mediterranean, Western Lesvos, Greece. Thirty-four sheep farmers were surveyed and secondary sources such as agricultural statistics and regional literature were analysed. The findings indicate a transition from an agrosilvopastoral system strongly dependent on local ecosystem services to a market economy with intensified animal production that has brought a significant loss of traditional ecological knowledge. This loss is expressed in the simplification of current management prac- tices in comparison to former ones. The causes of the resulting intensification and environmental degradation are mostly economic (low incomes from farming) and social (inability to manage collectively common resources). The landscape changes recorded are less arable land and more grazing lands in a time frame stretching back to the 1960s. Downloaded by [University of Aegean] at 02:22 29 May 2013 KEY WORDS: traditional ecological knowledge, agroforestry, silvopastoral, landscape change, Mediterranean, Western Lesvos 1. Introduction Mediterranean vegetation and landscapes have been shaped by domesticated animals over thousands of years (Blondel, 2006). A long-held view had been that widespread and long-lasting ‘overexploitation’ of natural resources through grazing in the Mediter- ranean had left behind ‘ruined landscapes’ (Grove & Rackham, 2001) of wastelands, devastated forests and degraded soils. But in the past 15 years, fundamentally opposed perspectives on the role of animals on Mediterranean ecosystems and landscapes have Correspondence Address: Thanasis Kizos, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, University Hill, 81100 Mytilini, Greece. Email: [email protected] Ó 2013 Landscape Research Group Ltd 2 T. Kizos et al. emerged. For example, Perevolotsky and Seligman (1998) argued in a seminal paper that traditional grazing was far from being destructive to the environment, but in fact an efficient and ecologically sound form of land use that generates resilient ecosystems with a high species diversity, productivity and utility to society. This view has been supported by the emerging revaluation of ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ (TEK)1 that is assumed to increase the capacity of social-ecological systems to deal with crises and to maintain resource flows in changing and uncertain conditions (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010; Olsson & Folke, 2001). It has been frequently demonstrated that traditional ecological knowledge is critical to the survival and future well-being of traditional societies worldwide (e.g. Berkes et al., 2000; Diaz et al., 2011; Moreno-Calles et al., 2010; Olsson & Folke, 2001; Parrotta & Agnoletti, 2007). In developed countries, the conservation of traditional knowledge may support rural development, local quality of life, and especially the conservation of biodiversity that has been generated by human influence on the landscape (Parrotta & Agnoletti, 2007). In Europe, the idea of tradi- tional knowledge found some echo in the notion of ‘traditional cultural landscapes’, which although criticised for conveying an alleged impression of stability in landscape histories (Renes, 2011) has been widely used in landscape studies and management (Antrop, 1997; Palang et al., 2006). Traditional cultural landscapes in Europe are typi- cally “derived from historic—frequently family and/or subsistence-style—farming meth- ods where the dominant cultural landscape characteristics are the result of a traditional or locally adapted approach to management” (Cooper et al., 2007, p. 29). Characterising landscape features are 1) the existence of high aesthetic and cultural values; 2) the pursuit of a broadly traditional or locally adapted approach to management; 3) the presence of features, whose distribution is regionally and/or locally specific, which contribute to the landscape’s aesthetic qualities and to its ecological integrity (Cooper et al., 2007; Moreira et al., 2006). In Europe, ‘hotspots’ of traditional cultural landscapes occur in areas of geographic, economic, infrastructural, political, or cultural isolation, in geographical set- tings difficult for agriculture, and in regions where inhabitants are ethnically and/or socially different from the national mainstream (Solymosi, 2011). The question of whether traditional ecological knowledge has persisted in animal husbandry is of major interest, as livestock raising in dryland ecosystems has experienced major changes since the 1960s, albeit with important spatial and temporal differences according to local and national contexts. Throughout Mediterranean Europe, Downloaded by [University of Aegean] at 02:22 29 May 2013 there was a comprehensive land use transition from formerly complex and multifunc- tional agrosilvopastoral land use systems to simplified and intensified forms of livestock husbandry (Rescia et al., 2010). Examples of affected landscapes include pastoral and forestry mountain landscapes in inland Greece, small-scale hamlet landscapes in northeastern Portugal, and the montado and dehesa landscapes in southern Portugal and Spain (Kizos, 2008; Pinto-Correia & Vos, 2004; Schaich et al., 2004). The simplifica- tion of localised multifunctional land use systems to intensive livestock grazing is believed to shift rangeland ecosystems from equilibrium states and to initiate processes of soil, vegetation and biodiversity degradation (Bakker et al., 2005; Giourga et al., 1998; Iosifides & Politidis, 2005; Plieninger et al., 2010). What has hardly been consid- ered so far are the potential implications of the land use transition in the Mediterranean on the body of traditional ecological knowledge (Plieninger et al., 2011). This study aims to reveal the social-ecological complexities that the transformation of livestock husbandry imposed on Mediterranean land uses and landscapes through a case study in Traditional Grazing Practices and Landscape Change in Western Lesvos, Greece 3 a semi-arid locality on an island, Lesvos, Greece, fairly typical of the Eastern Mediterranean. We analyse the specific changes in management practices and land- scapes that followed the increase of sheep numbers from the 1960s onwards from the perspective of farmers and other local stakeholders. We hypothesise that the transition from an agrosilvopastoral system strongly dependent on local ecosystem services to a market economy with intensified animal production has brought a significant loss of cultural legacies, traditional